This is a great event that is available to get all your questions
answered... Have storage questions regarding storage software
(Tivoli Storage Manager, Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack, Tivoli
Storage Productivity Center) come and ask the experts!

In my earlier postings on the topic of Unified Recovery Management (sorry for being away for so long), I laid out in excruciating detail the complexity that is facing today’s backup administrators: many different applications, on different hardware/OS platforms, in different locations, with different recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPO & RTO) to meet the operational requirements of the organization.

In the last entry, I covered some of the many technologies that are available and widely used to address different aspects of this complex issue. At the heart of the problem is, can any one backup administrator really have true visibility and control of the entire data protection and recovery process when there are so many solutions and interfaces used.

IBM Software has been working for several years to address this challenge by bringing our various data protection software products under the control of a single management interface, which is also common with many other IBM Tivoli software products.

The goals of this development initiative are: to manage the entire data protection and recovery infrastructure from a single administrative interface; to unify the management of data within an integrated portfolio: and to understand where all the recovery points are, manage them efficiently, and provide the interfaces to recover whatever data is needed, where ever it resides.

This interface is called the Tivoli Integrated Portal (TIP), and from it you can launch, monitor and manage the various Tivoli Storage data protection and recovery software products:

At the recent Gartner IOM 2010 conference in Orlando, Florida, I had the good fortune of listening to a series of interesting topics and meeting some really smart people. As one might have guessed, the bulk of the sessions focused on virtualization and cloud topics. But the one topic that piqued my interested was unrelated to virtualization and cloud - it was deduplication and was hosted by Dave Russell.

The intent of the session was to bring forward a some customer examples that were deploying deduplication technologies in their backup and recovery solutions. Most of you that read this blog know that deduplication and data reduction have been a hot topic in the industry. And as you likely know, almost every major vendor out there offers some form of deduplication with its associated benefits.

This session provided us two customers who were willing to talk about their experiences with deduplication and the benefits they've received. One customer is using CommVault and the other is using IBM Tivoli Storage Manager v6 (TSM). While both customers showcased the quantified benefits from deduplication, the presentation from the TSM customer went beyond just the benefits of deduplication. The TSM customer revealed their quantified benefits and also identified some of the best practices they developed regarding deduplication.

This particular TSM customer is a large producer of natural gas in the U.S. The customers environment has TSM managing about 1.3 petabytes of data from over 1500+ nodes. Overall, their approach to managing backup storage is do it as efficiently as possible and to reduce the overall amount of backup data under management.

Prior to leveraging TSM deduplication, this customer began with "incremental forever" and compression. Once TSM v6 was released, they adopted deduplication at the server and client in concert with the other data reduction features provided by TSM.

As they began evaluating their use of deduplication, they had to deal with demands from their internal customers - DBA and Exchange admins like full backups etc. Furthermore, they had to consider how their rate of data change, evaluate retention policies, and ensure that their restore requirements weren't negatively impacted by the use of deduplication.

After significant testing and planning, the customer decided that they would initially deploy deduplication for their Oracle databases and Windows OS and system state backups. The results of using TSM deduplication were impressive ...

Oracle deduplication results - 75% reduction of Oracle backup data after deduplication. This was on 3.8TB of physical space on disk and about 15 TBs of data on tape.

And their results on Windows OS and System State were a whopping 94% ... taking them from 172GB of managed data down to 11.4 GB. In this scenario, the customer leveraged TSM 6.2 client- or source-side deduplication.

Overall, very impressive results. By leveraging the data reduction features within TSM, the customer was able to save by using less tapes library cells, tape drives, and disks.

In the end, the customer stated that TSM data reduction (with deduplication) helped them meet their objectives - efficiently reduce data under management. Furthermore, it allows them to reduce their overall HW costs and meet or improve restore requirements. The last comment the customer made before closing the session was that with all the various TSM data reduction capabilities in production, their job had ultimately gotten simpler now that their environment was running more efficiently ...

This is a fantastic story that I really enjoy sharing. If you are a TSM customer and have benefited from its data reduction technologies, then please give me a shout as I would like to hear your story as well.

Siemens AG Austriaemploys about 7,700 staff. Its business activities focus on the three sectors of industry, energy and healthcare as well as on IT solutions and services.Business need:Siemens needed a secure solution that would enable them to record all the data collected in the control center without any gaps, archive it for a period of five years and to store it for possible later analysis. Solution:Siemens worked with IBM to create an optimized system performance solution utilizing a parallel data backup system.Benefits:IBM Tivoli Storage Management (TSM) supports the parallel backup of databases and thereby enables significant savings in time. The parallel backup of the databases avoids the in-completion of backups due to the unavailability of individual components. The system solution offers a high level of quality with optimal performance and is characterized by a high degree of reliability and availability.Read the complete case study for more information on how Siemens AG Austria optimized system performance through parallel data backup.More success stories of other customer implementations of IBM technologies can be foundhere.

Juniper Networks recently published a solution brief regarding the performance boost you get from using TSM Fastback in concert with their WAN optimization (WXC). The value proposition is pretty straightforward: reduced backup times and reduced WAN bandwidth and cost. You can read the full details in the report, but here are a few snippets worth noting:

Conceptual view of the bandwidth savings ...

Savings of backing up 92GB over a 155Mbps link with 100 ms latency:

These savings are above and beyond those you already get with using TSM Fastback (taken from solution brief):

The IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack provides an extensive and cost-effective data protection and recovery solution specifically designed to help remote offices maintain operations, regardless of the type of data loss.

The FastBack Client uses next-generation, block-level technology to capture new and changed data on the application servers as frequently as needed—up to true CDP—with almost no performance impact on the applications. This provides for much more granular recovery, leaving much less data at risk of loss than traditional once-a-night backup solutions.

The FastBack Server provides the management, policy engine, and local repository for the protected data. The server includes near-instant restore capabilities, enabling critical applications to resume within seconds following almost any type of data loss. The server also initiates “selective replication” jobs to send copies of selected data over the WAN to another location for disaster recovery and backup consolidation capabilities.

The FastBack DR Server aggregates the backup data from multiple remote offices—enabling extremely fast recovery of remote office workloads should an office go offline for any reason. The FastBack DR Server also can be used to enhance protection of business-critical application servers in the data center, and it integrates easily with central data protection and retention solutions such as IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager.

TSM Fastback is a solution that has seen strong adoption from customers with remote offices ... If backup times or bandwidth usage over a WAN are a concern, I suggest you look into the WXC offering from Juniper Networks in concert with TSM Fastback.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack is an advanced continuous data protection and near-instant recovery software solution for business-critical Windows and Linux servers in the data center, remote offices and small- to mid-sized enterprises. Customers use Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack to help reduce the amount of data at risk between backups to almost zero, and to reduce the time to recover from almost any data loss to just seconds. TSM FastBack also includes built-in target-side data deduplication; all of this adds up to reducing the costs of storage, bandwidth and administration. Optional add-ons include Bare Machine Recovery to quickly restore the operating system volume to similar, dissimilar and virtual hardware; and granular recovery of individual e-mail objects from Microsoft Exchange.

On July 30, 2010, IBM released Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack v6.1.1 which includes data deduplication across FastBack Servers and locations when consolidating remote office backup to a central Tivoli Storage Manager Server. These enhancements further improve backup and disaster recovery performance, cut costs, and expand on FastBack integration with Tivoli Storage Manager to provide a true Unified Recovery Management platform.

Also in this new release are: support for Microsoft Exchange 2010, including granular e-mail object recovery in TSM FastBack for Microsoft Exchange; doubling the amount of data that a FastBack server can protect; extending near-instant restore capability to Linux volumes; and many other performance and ease-of-use improvements.

VINCI PLC, based in Watford, UK, is the largest British arm of
VINCI, the world’s leading concession and construction group. The
company operates in the sectors of building, civil engineering, air,
facilities and technology. VINCI PLC has in the region up to 4,000
employees and its annual turnover exceeds £1 billion.Business need:To consolidate several
acquisitions and implement a new ERP system, VINCI PLC needed to extend
its storage infrastructure and sought a reliable, flexible,
easy-to-manage platform for handling rapid growth.

I have been writing about IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager on Windows and some of the new functions that we released earlier this year like Exchange Server 2010 support and SQL Server 2008 R2 support. We are working on some more exciting enhancements and I want to tell you about an early access program for the next release of FlashCopy Manager. If you are interested in looking at and testing some of the new functions and features of the next release of IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager, please contact your IBM Tivoli Sales Representative to get more information.

This is a nice opportunity to see what is coming in the next release of FlashCopy Manager and test it in your own environment. Act now!

I have been working in storage and storage management my entire career (which has been more years than I want to admit) and I was recently advised by a wise co-worker to start writing about it. Although blogging has been around for quite some time and has certainly increased in popularity in recent years, this is the first time I have braved this form of communication. I stared at a blank blinking cursor for inspiration and decided to write about one of my favorite storage products, the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center.

Several weeks ago IBM announced the new 4.2 release of Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. This release includes some interesting enhancements that I am excited to see in the product. One feature that has received a lot of buzz is the lightweight storage
resource agents. TPC started down the path of lighter agents when they
introduced a slimmer, but not completely lightweight version of the
agents by moving from Java to C for enhanced performance. These new
agents were limited to Windows, AIX, and Linux. The new 4.2 release
added HP-UX and Solaris support as well as support for file and
database-level management. The new release is backward compatible
meaning that customers who want to continue using agents they set up
previously can do so. New customers are no longer required to use the
Common Agent Manager.

TPC 4.2 has introduced full support for XIV devices. TPC 4.1 did have
toleration support for XIV (basic discovery and capacity information),
but the new release you can provision, get performance information, and
use the data path explorer for your XIV machine.

If you have TPC deployed on a System Storage Productivity Center (SSPC) can upgrade at any time. Customers buying a new SSPC machine after September 3, 2010 will automatically have TPC 4.2 pre-installed on the machine.

I could say a lot more about the new TPC 4.2 release, but instead I am going to point you to a wonderful blog entry that my colleague, Tony Pearson, wrote when the new release was announced. He provides some great insights about the new features in TPC 4.2.

Wow - I made it to the end of my first blog and I am beginning to understand why blogging has become so popular. I am starting to wonder why it took me so long to write my first blog?

Boy oh boy, time sure flies when you're having fun. It seems like I was just at Pulse 2010 in Las Vegas, being a roving reporter, capturing customer, business partner and Subject Matter Expert Videos. It's actually been about nine months and once again it's time to ramp up for Pulse 2011.

Pulse will return to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas February 27 through March 2, 2011. Just like Pulse 2010, we're looking for client speakers to share their success stories and speak in the different track sessions. Do you have a storage success story? What are you doing to make your organization smarter when it comes to storing and backing up your data? How do you gain visibility across your infrastructure, including your storage environment? Are you in control of your data, no matter where it resides? How have you leveraged automation technologies to manage the explosion of data, and the need for instant accessibility? We want to hear from you! What software, hardware and services are you utilizing to deliver better services within your organization, to your internal and external customers? Come share your story of how you're using IBM Storage as a part of your organization's Integrated Service Management implementation.

At Pulse 2010, there were over 300 client speakers and if you weren't a speaker then, you should definitely submit your proposal for Pulse 2011. Check out the benefits of being a client speaker!

Client Speaker Benefits:Pulse 2011 client speakers will receive complimentary registration to the conference and the first 50 to submit a proposal will receive a FREE hotel accommodations upgrade* to a Celebrity Spa Suite at the MGM Grand if the proposal is accepted!*The speaker pays for the basic room and will be awarded the upgrade if they submit one of the first 50 papers to be accepted.

Client Speaker Benefits include:

One full conference pass ($1995 value)

Use of our exclusive Client Speaker VIP Lounge

Networking opportunities with over 6000 industry experts, press, and analysts

Eligibility for the Maximo Best Practices Award (EAM papers only).

Read Jennifer Dennis' blog Pulse 2011 Call for Speakers - Opens 9/22 @ibm.com/pulse! for details on submitting your proposal. Don't delay, get prepared to submit your proposal right away, those 50 upgrades will be going fast!!! Here are some customer speaker interviews I did during Pulse 2010, hopefully this will give you an idea of what you can submit for your proposal.